8 ms·

RIP Google Hangouts, Google’s last, best chance to compete with iMessage

88 points by samizdis 4y ago

brokenmachine 4y ago
They must have some serious political problems inside Google. I simply can't believe a company the size of Google can't make a good chat app. A simple chat app is literally one of the first apps you create as a beginning programmer. Hangouts was good. Did what it needs to do and a tiny bit more. Google Chat is a bad joke, with obvious glaring bugs that remain since the whole time I was forced onto it (years? feels like decades)... Have a look through the 1-star reviews on the Play store and get an idea of how many bugs Chat continues to have. Continuous "updates", yet no user-visible differences at all? I would think that a top 1% app developer with the resources that Google has available to them should be able to make a workable Hangouts-clone in maybe a few weeks? What is this crap?
PaulHoule 4y ago
One take is that Google’s problem is the world’s problem. That is, for 30 years it’s been one chat application after another that in incompatible with the rest. The idea that a Verizon customer can talk to an AT&T customer or that an Honor phone owner can talk to a Nokia phone owner is as foreign to ‘chat’ as the right clicker mentality is to blockheads. If Europe hadn’t driven away the UK and spent it’s regulatory capital harassing us with cookie pop ups they could have done something significant…. Like require chat interoperability. If Google had seen interoperability as the key problem and made their own chat applications interoperable that would have been a beginning.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dboreham 4y ago
  Google had a chat application that interoperated (via XMPP) long long ago. They actually only took it down in June of this year.
- djmips 4y ago
  "Europe hadn’t driven away the UK " -> say what?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I am not in the EU and I want to leave the EU because of cookie popups. It's a clear case, maybe the only clear case, where the EU has made life worse for everyone, including Britons. Unfortunately there is huge support for cookie popups in the tech industry and any criticism of cookie popups gets downvoted viciously because cookie popups silenced the no-modals advice you'd get from any UI professional and opened the floodgates to sites like Substack popping up dark pattern popups on every page, sometimes multiple popups, to ask for your email address so they can spam spam spam you forever.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
1. Why did they ever call it "Hangouts". 2. Why did they proceed to have half a dozen different messaging services? 3. Why didn't they relentlessly focus on feature parity with iMessage in the default Messages app on Android phones? 4. Why didn't they invest heavily in a single unified app that iOS users would be attracted to, just like they're attracted to Maps and Mail? It's really baffling to me how such a smart company has managed to be so dumb.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Google Hangouts, like all the other google chat apps, was never intended to gain dominance, it was intended to win promotions for those involved.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    I've heard this explanation and I believe it. Nonetheless: Sundar Pichai has been CEO of Google since 2015. One would think that unifying messaging would be a priority from on-high since at least that time. Instead the company allowed poor management to continue, rather than grabbing this issue and saying "stop playing promotion games, this business is strategically important." But it didn't.
    - smt88 4y ago
      Why is chat strategically important? What is Alphabet's strategy? They've only ever made substantial profit from ads, YouTube (which they acquired), and possibly Workspace or Cloud. The last time I looked at their filings, they weren't transparent about which businesses are profitable. This isn't a company that's had a coherent identity or strategy. iMessage is important to Apple because it's an exclusive social network that only Apple devices can access. Slack is important because it's a backbone of a business SaaS ecosystem. But Hangouts was never going to have either of these functions.
      - matthewdgreen 4y ago
        Because protecting their lucrative ads business means preventing a competing hardware/OS company from gaining majority market-share and strangling you with its platform. That's why the very expensive (not profitable) Android project exists in the first place. And when such a competitor gains too much power, your ads business can suffer very real non-theoretical harms [1]. Right now Apple iOS marketshare is increasing: it's reached 60% in the US and an amazing 87% among teenagers! (Who tend to "stick" with a platform even after they become adults.) And while there are many features that are driving the push towards iOS (it's not just messaging!) the dominance of iMessage is definitely one feature people [particularly younger ones] care very much about. And while fixing messaging might not be the only problem here, it's relatively "inexpensive" to run messaging correctly compared to the cost of fixing things after your OS market share crosses a tipping point. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/09/06/apple-crashes-advertising-duopoly-google-and-facebooks-stranglehold-loosening-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/09/06/apple-cras...
jaimex2 4y ago
Not only did they lose any chance of competing with iMessage. Meta took over their home turf, Google has nothing people use on Android.
- thefounder 4y ago
  They have the search engine, youtube, maps and appstore
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    And Chrome!
  - jaimex2 4y ago
    I meant in messaging. No one uses Duo, Allo, Messaging etc.
- adammarples 4y ago
  A quick look at my home screen I see search, maps, calendar, keep, translate, Gmail, photos, and drive
  - jaimex2 4y ago
    Sorry should have clarified - Messaging products. Facebook/Meta is what most people use. Be it FB Messenger/WhatsApp/Insta etc. Google have nothing in their own ecosystem people use.
lawgimenez 4y ago
I would like to export my Hangouts chat, so many memories. Google should give us that option to at least export.
- pythonaut_16 4y ago
  Google Takeout will let you export all of your data, mostly as JSON. There are some parsers for it on the web.
  - lawgimenez 4y ago
    Thank I will look into it.
pcurve 4y ago
“ By 2014, the app was fully operational, and featured Hangouts Messages, SMS, and Go” I had no idea the hangout was all that. I never opened it because I thought it was another social gathering thing. It’s a terrible name. It’s also more terrible Google was reluctant to retire old product names but I understand. Retiring names and consolidating become extremely heated political conversation. I have so many battle scars from it. You need a really strong leadership to call the shots on it. The current one probably isn’t doing it
baxtr 4y ago
Why compete with iMessage in the first place? Instead compete with WhatsApp and Meta.
- andrewshadura 4y ago
  Neither was well-known or big at that time.
  - kasabali 4y ago
    Whatsapp wasextremely well known and big in 2013.
Wazako 4y ago
I don't know if I'm the only one, but the biggest problem of google (which is the same as microsoft), is the unified account system. It's very complicated to switch from business to personal accounts. And that creates a lot of friction for me.
- Teslazar 4y ago
  Can you use two browser profiles, one for personal and one for business? Or, if it goes beyond the browser, perhaps two OS users?
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    Container tabs on Firefox are great for this situation. Unfortunately however if you choose to go this route performance on Google's webapps is not as good as chromium-based browsers.
__derek__ 4y ago
Interesting history of Google's messaging efforts, but this is a really questionable assertion to close with: > The result of all of this is that a staggering 87 percent of US teenagers have iPhones now, all because Google didn't view messaging as valuable.
jacquesc 4y ago
Great article. I hope whatever idiots at Google who made these decisions are held accountable. I was a Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Hangouts user who also felt their product negligence was going to eventually catch up with them.
blackflame7000 4y ago
Google has no idea how to create a social media platform. They aren't "cool" enough. Apple could create something tomorrow totally generic that makes google+ look like myspace just because they have far more cultural clout

88 points by samizdis 4y ago

They must have some serious political problems inside Google. I simply can't believe a company the size of Google can't make a good chat app. A simple chat app is literally one of the first apps you create as a beginning programmer. Hangouts was good. Did what it needs to do and a tiny bit more. Google Chat is a bad joke, with obvious glaring bugs that remain since the whole time I was forced onto it (years? feels like decades)... Have a look through the 1-star reviews on the Play store and get an idea of how many bugs Chat continues to have. Continuous "updates", yet no user-visible differences at all? I would think that a top 1% app developer with the resources that Google has available to them should be able to make a workable Hangouts-clone in maybe a few weeks? What is this crap?

PaulHoule 4y ago

One take is that Google’s problem is the world’s problem. That is, for 30 years it’s been one chat application after another that in incompatible with the rest. The idea that a Verizon customer can talk to an AT&T customer or that an Honor phone owner can talk to a Nokia phone owner is as foreign to ‘chat’ as the right clicker mentality is to blockheads. If Europe hadn’t driven away the UK and spent it’s regulatory capital harassing us with cookie pop ups they could have done something significant…. Like require chat interoperability. If Google had seen interoperability as the key problem and made their own chat applications interoperable that would have been a beginning.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dboreham 4y ago
Google had a chat application that interoperated (via XMPP) long long ago. They actually only took it down in June of this year.
djmips 4y ago
"Europe hadn’t driven away the UK " -> say what?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I am not in the EU and I want to leave the EU because of cookie popups. It's a clear case, maybe the only clear case, where the EU has made life worse for everyone, including Britons. Unfortunately there is huge support for cookie popups in the tech industry and any criticism of cookie popups gets downvoted viciously because cookie popups silenced the no-modals advice you'd get from any UI professional and opened the floodgates to sites like Substack popping up dark pattern popups on every page, sometimes multiple popups, to ask for your email address so they can spam spam spam you forever.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

1. Why did they ever call it "Hangouts". 2. Why did they proceed to have half a dozen different messaging services? 3. Why didn't they relentlessly focus on feature parity with iMessage in the default Messages app on Android phones? 4. Why didn't they invest heavily in a single unified app that iOS users would be attracted to, just like they're attracted to Maps and Mail? It's really baffling to me how such a smart company has managed to be so dumb.

pjc50 4y ago
Google Hangouts, like all the other google chat apps, was never intended to gain dominance, it was intended to win promotions for those involved.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I've heard this explanation and I believe it. Nonetheless: Sundar Pichai has been CEO of Google since 2015. One would think that unifying messaging would be a priority from on-high since at least that time. Instead the company allowed poor management to continue, rather than grabbing this issue and saying "stop playing promotion games, this business is strategically important." But it didn't.
  - smt88 4y ago
    Why is chat strategically important? What is Alphabet's strategy? They've only ever made substantial profit from ads, YouTube (which they acquired), and possibly Workspace or Cloud. The last time I looked at their filings, they weren't transparent about which businesses are profitable. This isn't a company that's had a coherent identity or strategy. iMessage is important to Apple because it's an exclusive social network that only Apple devices can access. Slack is important because it's a backbone of a business SaaS ecosystem. But Hangouts was never going to have either of these functions.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      Because protecting their lucrative ads business means preventing a competing hardware/OS company from gaining majority market-share and strangling you with its platform. That's why the very expensive (not profitable) Android project exists in the first place. And when such a competitor gains too much power, your ads business can suffer very real non-theoretical harms [1]. Right now Apple iOS marketshare is increasing: it's reached 60% in the US and an amazing 87% among teenagers! (Who tend to "stick" with a platform even after they become adults.) And while there are many features that are driving the push towards iOS (it's not just messaging!) the dominance of iMessage is definitely one feature people [particularly younger ones] care very much about. And while fixing messaging might not be the only problem here, it's relatively "inexpensive" to run messaging correctly compared to the cost of fixing things after your OS market share crosses a tipping point. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/09/06/apple-crashes-advertising-duopoly-google-and-facebooks-stranglehold-loosening-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/09/06/apple-cras...

jaimex2 4y ago

Not only did they lose any chance of competing with iMessage. Meta took over their home turf, Google has nothing people use on Android.

thefounder 4y ago
They have the search engine, youtube, maps and appstore
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  And Chrome!
- jaimex2 4y ago
  I meant in messaging. No one uses Duo, Allo, Messaging etc.
adammarples 4y ago
A quick look at my home screen I see search, maps, calendar, keep, translate, Gmail, photos, and drive
- jaimex2 4y ago
  Sorry should have clarified - Messaging products. Facebook/Meta is what most people use. Be it FB Messenger/WhatsApp/Insta etc. Google have nothing in their own ecosystem people use.

lawgimenez 4y ago

I would like to export my Hangouts chat, so many memories. Google should give us that option to at least export.

pythonaut_16 4y ago
Google Takeout will let you export all of your data, mostly as JSON. There are some parsers for it on the web.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  Thank I will look into it.

pcurve 4y ago

“ By 2014, the app was fully operational, and featured Hangouts Messages, SMS, and Go” I had no idea the hangout was all that. I never opened it because I thought it was another social gathering thing. It’s a terrible name. It’s also more terrible Google was reluctant to retire old product names but I understand. Retiring names and consolidating become extremely heated political conversation. I have so many battle scars from it. You need a really strong leadership to call the shots on it. The current one probably isn’t doing it

baxtr 4y ago

Why compete with iMessage in the first place? Instead compete with WhatsApp and Meta.

andrewshadura 4y ago
Neither was well-known or big at that time.
- kasabali 4y ago
  Whatsapp wasextremely well known and big in 2013.

Wazako 4y ago

I don't know if I'm the only one, but the biggest problem of google (which is the same as microsoft), is the unified account system. It's very complicated to switch from business to personal accounts. And that creates a lot of friction for me.

Teslazar 4y ago
Can you use two browser profiles, one for personal and one for business? Or, if it goes beyond the browser, perhaps two OS users?
- joecool1029 4y ago
  Container tabs on Firefox are great for this situation. Unfortunately however if you choose to go this route performance on Google's webapps is not as good as chromium-based browsers.

__derek__ 4y ago

Interesting history of Google's messaging efforts, but this is a really questionable assertion to close with: > The result of all of this is that a staggering 87 percent of US teenagers have iPhones now, all because Google didn't view messaging as valuable.

jacquesc 4y ago

Great article. I hope whatever idiots at Google who made these decisions are held accountable. I was a Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Hangouts user who also felt their product negligence was going to eventually catch up with them.

blackflame7000 4y ago

Google has no idea how to create a social media platform. They aren't "cool" enough. Apple could create something tomorrow totally generic that makes google+ look like myspace just because they have far more cultural clout